Looking back on the history of modern art from today's perspective,
it is difficult to conceive of the bewilderment "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon" occasioned among Picasso's contemporaries. One German
critic, Wilhelm Uhde, thought it "Assyrian" in some way or other;
Georges Braque felt it was as if a fire-eater had been drinking
petrol; and Derain ventured that some day Picasso would hang himself
behind his picture. Comments such as these seem all the more
incomprehensible in view of the importance the painting was soon to
have: Cubism derived its formal idiom from it. Most emphatically there
were two sides to the work's reception.

The contemporary verdict is illuminating. After all, it was not the
opinion of the general public - Picasso kept the picture under wraps,
so it was not widely seen till the 1920s and thus not widely subject
to the opinion of the public. The bewilderment came from art dealers,
fellow artists and friends, all of them insiders with progressive,
avant-garde views, surely the ideal receivers of work so profoundly
innovative. Why were they so helpless and shocked? Because the
painting really was utterly new, something that had never before been
seen. And yet, like all things revolutionary, the "Demoiselles
d'Avignon" signalled not only a new start but also the end of a long
process of development.

Picasso had evolved a new form by examining the idiom that had
prevailed in European art since the Renaissance, dismantling its
rules, and re-applying its mechanisms. In doing so he transcended that
idiom and - logically - the principles underlying it. This was his
declared aim, and he succeeded in achieving it.

Picasso marked the end of a historical process that had begun in
the mid-18th century. At that time, writers on aesthetics, thinkers
such as Denis Diderot or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, had scrutinized and
re-defined the meaning and function of painting. Since the
Renaissance, art had been of a functional, content-oriented nature,
serving to convey messages in visual form. The imitation of Nature and
the illusionistic reproduction of the appearance of things was a way
of making the world comprehensible. Paintings could tell stories by
showing narrative actions, representing emotions, and expressing the
movements of the soul.

The dichotomy between given reality and imitation produced numerous
possible ways of communication. In the 18th century this changed
significantly. The frontiers of painting were defined anew and it was
stripped of its narrative side; now it could only represent. It was
not long before the representational function of painting was
questioned too, since it was essentially an illusionist process
dependent on purely technical and unreliable processes. The philosophy
of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer prompted a recognition of the absolute
aesthetic impact of painting and the autonomous status of
draughtsmanship and colour.

This was a fundamental change. Where once content and form, message
and image had needed to harmonize, now form became dominant, and
indeed became the content. If ways of seeing, conceptualization, and
cognition were to be considered inseparable, then the cognitive
content of painting must logically enough be purely a matter of how
the observer looked at it. Inevitably, once this view gained ground,
painting would tend to lose its mimetic character and become detached
from the things which it claimed to represent. French 19th-century art
and the art of post-Romantic northern Europe underwent a parallel move
towards greater abstraction.

Nude with Raised Arms1907

Friendship1907

That evolution peaked in Picasso's "Demoiselles". It is the key
work of Modernist art. Of course Picasso had his precursors - but the
Impressionists' colourful attempts to capture the fleeting moment, and
the Fauves' orgiastic use of colour, essentially remained faithful to
the principle of mimesis. Random changes of natural form and colour,
such as the Impressionists and Fauves used in their different ways,
were psychologically prompted, and aimed at establishing moods. The
natural original which the painting represented remained unaffected.
Deviations were merely shifts in expressive emphasis.

Cezanne was of greater significance for High Modernism, though.
However, his deconstruction of the given, and his treatment of form
and colour, were stylistically determined. His reduction of natural
shapes to geometrical solids upheld the traditional technical
repertoire of the academies. Still, Cezanne did show what an
individualist approach could accomplish. And his work served as a
vital point of reference in the turning-point year of 1907: a direct
line of evolution runs from his "Bathers" to Matisse's "Blue Nude"
(Baltimore, Museum of Art), Derain's "Bathers" (New York, Museum of
Modern Art), and finally the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" (all three of
which were painted in 1907). It is a telling fact that it was a
painter academic in the cast of his thinking - Picasso - who created
the formal approach of the new art.

Picasso started not from colour but from form and form alone. This
too reflected his place in history. In the 19th century, scientists
made important discoveries relating to the human organs and the
principles of sense perception. The physiological independence of
cognitive processes was established, and this legitimized aesthetic
views on the subject and indeed provided artists with a new impetus.
Experiments in colour vision conducted by the Frenchmen Joseph Plateau
and Eugene Chevreul in 1834 and 1839 influenced painters from
Delacroix to Georges Seurat. Hermann Helmholtz's "Physiology of
Optics" (1867) and Wilhelm Wundt's "Physiological Psychology" (1886)
were widely available in the French translations.

Queen Isabella1908

The Parisian literary avant-garde liked to discuss the ideas on the
spatial sense which William James, taking Helmholtz further, had
expressed in his "Principles of Psychology" (1890). The book did not
offer Picasso any direct inspiration to revise figurational
procedures, and indeed he would have found little more in the
physiological mechanics described than techniques of formal figuration
which he had long been familiar with through drawing. Still, these
publications hallmarked the spirit of the age. It was a period when an
artist might be in a position to rethink first principles. This was
also true of the discovery of unfamiliar modes of expression -the
contemporary enthusiasm for what was considered primitive or exotic
art. We need only recall the influence Japanese woodcuts had on van
Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and the interest in archaic art which
Picasso himself had recently demonstrated. This all resulted from the
quest for new ways of creating visual images, traditional methods no
longer seeming adequate to the needs of the age. There is nothing more
indicative of his contemporaries' helplessness, and their way of
clinging to newly-established conventions, than the terms that were
applied to Picasso's painting. To Uhde the "Demoiselles" seemed
"Assyrian", and Henri ("Le Douanier") Rousseau, prized for his naive
art, said Picasso's Cubism was "Egyptian". The inapt supposition that
the new visual idiom drew on black, African art - though this did play
some part for the Cubists later - was a product of this way of
thinking too. Of course Picasso saw it all, and was prompted to find a
basic solution to the problem. He drew till he had devised a new
formal language, which he then articulated in "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon" - showing how the old could be re-used to make something
altogether new. If they were perplexed at first, his fellow artists
soon understood what he was doing. Cubism became established, slowly
but surely: the first major peak that it reached is generally known as
Analytical Cubism.

Picasso's famous portrait of art dealer Ambroise Vollard is an
arresting example. Amidst the complex criss-cross of lines
and overlapping colour zones we are immediately struck by the head. It
is done entirely in shades of yellow; and it also strikes us because,
unlike the composition as a whole, it clearly represents the outline,
structure and features of a human head. The oval broadens at the
jowls. About the middle there are lines to denote eyebrows and the
bridge of the nose. At right and left, narrow patches of white clearly
indicate sideburns. We see the face of a man with a high, commanding
forehead and a short beard already grey at the sides - a somewhat
older man, presumably. The central lines delineate a strong, straight
nose with a noticeable dent and broad nostrils. The thin upper lip
also conveys the sitter's personality.

Picasso's painting fulfils the main requirements of a portrait: it
represents the outer appearance of a certain individual in a
recognisable way. But the artist is also displaying his skill at
playing with the natural image. The lines are continued at random, no
longer restricted to defining an available form. They have a life of
their own. So do the colours: lighter and darker shades, with little
regard for the subject, obey the curious rules of the composition
instead. The subject is dissected, as it were, or analyzed. And hence
this kind of Cubism has become known as "Analytical Cubism".

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard1910

The Dryad1908

Though the laws of the random afford common ground, the portrait of
Vollard remains a distinctly different work from "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon". In the 1907 painting the aim was closed form; in the 1910
work it is open figuration. The dissolution of the subject establishes
a kind of grid in which overlaps and correspondences can constantly be
read anew. The essential characteristics of the subject are preserved
purely because Picasso is out to demonstrate that the autonomy of line
and colour is on a par with straightforward representation, and just
as convincing aesthetically. His new approach put an end to the
traditional scheme of foreground, middleground and background, and the
demarcation of subject and setting, which were still present in the
"Demoiselles". Between the two extremes lay a three-year transitional
period. It began in 1908 and can be seen as the phase in which Cubism
was established.

The first works to follow the "Demoiselles" highlighted the
draughtsmanship and the correspondence of subject and background.
Colour and line were juxtaposed or at times contraposed, as in the
famous "The Dance of the Veils(Nude with Drapes)".
Picasso's 1908 "Composition with a Skull" must be seen as a continuation
of this line. But in the two great nudes that he worked on from spring
to autumn 1908 the emphases were clearly being placed differently. In
both "Three Women" and "The Dryad (Nude in a Forest)" the draughtsman's lines are no longer so independent of the
subject. Now, the lines and colour zones are creating shapes of
geometrical import. But the perspective has been exploded, so that
various points of view are at work in the same composition. The light
and shade are not juxtaposed in a spatial relation; yet spaces and
areas derived from the construction of form evolve a spatial presence.

The Dance of the Veils (Nude with Drapes)1907

Three Women1908

In midsummer 1908 Picasso made a breakthrough with his landscapes.
"House in a Garden (House and Trees)" and the simply-titled
"Landscape" take the principle of autonomous spatial
values and evolve forms that make a stereometrically stylized
impression. At the same time, the young French painter Braque had
arrived at a similar position. He had met Picasso in spring 1907, and
had seen "Le's Demoiselles d'Avignon" at Picasso's studio that
November. Though it startled him at first, the painting's impact
stayed with him, and mingled with ideas derived from Cezanne. During
two stays in southern France in summer 1908, painting the landscape
near L'Estaque, Braque deconstructed representational and spatial
values. The fundamental coincidence of his approach and that in
Picasso's landscapes is arresting. But they were working independently
of each other, with no direct contact.

At first glance, the motifs look like cubes - which is why the term
"Cubism" was coined in the first place. In autumn 1908, Braque
unsuccessfully submitted his new work for the Paris autumn Salon.
Matisse, who was a member of the jury, observed to the critic Louis
Vauxcelles that the pictures consisted of lots of little cubes.
Vaux-celles adopted the phrase in a review he wrote in the magazine
"Gil Blas" when Braque showed the paintings at the Kahnweiler gallery
in November. And thus (as is so often the case) a misunderstanding
produced a label; and by 1911 everyone was using the term "Cubism".

House in a Garden1908

House in the Garden1908

Landscape1908

Landscape1908

Landscape with Two Figures1908

Fernande with a Black Mantilla1909

In the winter of 1908, following Braque's exhibition, Picasso and
Braque developed a give-and-take that often verged on collaboration.
The Spaniard's misgivings about the Frenchman vanished. (That spring
he was still accusing Braque of pirating his inventions without making
any acknowledgement.) They did not share a studio, though; both
artists worked resolutely on their own. But they did meet constantly
to discuss their progress and learn from each other. They took trips -
Picasso to Spain in 1909 and 1910, Braque twice to La Roche-Guyon in
the Seine valley. Not till summer 1911 did they spend time together in
Ceret in the south of France, a popular artists' colony. They compared
the fruits of their labours and debated new possibilities, often in a
competitive spirit. Thus, for instance, Picasso's "Girlwith
a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier)" is plainly a response to a
painting by Braque. Both artists - and this is unique in the history
of art - were developing a new style together. It was emphatically a
give-and-take process: both artists have the same standing in the
history of Cubism. The painstaking Braque, a slow worker, painted
extraordinarily subtle works incomparable in their aesthetic effect.
By contrast, Picasso was more restless and abrupt, jumping to and fro
amongst various formal options. Both were experimenting in their own
way, and both, independently, hit upon significant innovations.

Woman with a Mandolin1909

Woman with a Mandolin1909

Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier)1910

Woman with a Mandolin1911

For Picasso, drawing and the investigation of form were always the
focus of his interest. One of the finest and most instructive of his
games played with form is the still life "Loaves and Bowl of Fruit on
a Table", painted in winter 1908/09, a drop-leaf table with
loaves of bread, a cloth, a bowl of fruit and a lemon on it. The
informing principle is not one of Cubist transformation, though, so
much as a genuine metamorphosis - for the picture began by showing not
objects in a still life but carnival merry-makers in a bistro! Picasso
pursued his idea through a number of studies. The first showed a
flat-perspective group of six at a drop-leaf table. Subsequently he
interwove the forms so as to blur the distinction between the subject
and the background. His most conspicuous stylistic feature was the
spatial extension of lines to include the figures in a veritable
scaffolding of major diagonals and curves that dominated the entire
picture. In other sketches he bunched lines together, and
made visible progress in the deconstruction of form. The motifs and
directional movements assembled into geometrical figures - trapeziums,
rhombuses - which, taken individually, had already become completely
non-representational. Light and shadow likewise acquired a life of
their own, appearing in contrastive shades of lighter and darker.

Loaves and Bowl of Fruit on a Table1908

At this stage, Picasso had put mimesis aside and was free to define
his forms anew. As he went on, formal similarities remained -though we
would not perceive them if we did not have the preliminary studies.
Thus the man's left arm propped on the table became a baguette, and
his right arm became another, while the hand he was resting on the
table became an upturned cup with no handle. The loaf in mid-table,
cut into, was formerly the left forearm of a harlequin. The bust of
the woman seated at left became the fruit bowl. These metamorphoses
occurred in the smallest details; X-ray examination has shown that
Picasso accomplished this fundamental transformation of what was once
a figure composition in one bout of work on the canvas.

With such rethinking of visual possibilities in his mind, Picasso,
prompted by the southern light when he was in Spain during 1909,
created pictures that approached perspective and optics as an
interweaving of geometrical shapes and colour tonalities. Eloquent
examples are "The Reservoir (Horta de Ebro)", "Houses on the Hill" and
"Brick Factory in Tortosa".

The Reservoir1909

Houses on the Hill1909

Brick Factory in Tortosa1909

Head of a Woman
(Fernande)Bronze
1909

It is characteristic of Picasso (and a contrast to Braque) that he
never saw Cubism purely in terms of painting. He tackled spatial
values and planes in various media, using various motifs. Braque at
that time restricted himself to relatively few kinds of picture,
preferring those such as landscapes or still lifes that were conducive
to abstracted formal games, and in his work he experimented with the
manifold opportunities that monochrome painting afforded. Picasso, for
his part, stuck to his usual repertoire of subjects. He tried to
introduce them into his new experiments, and did not flinch from
strong colour contrasts. Thus in 1909 he did a number of portraits
that explored the analytic breakdown of form.
The areas of the human face defined by the placing of nose, mouth,
cheeks, forehead and eyes, and resolved by light and shadow, were now
a fabric of juxtaposed planes. And, as in 1906, Picasso went into
questions of volume in sculpture, to see if they too had autonomous
values. In preparing the near-lifesize "Head of a Woman (Fernande)", a
portrait of Fernande Olivier, Picasso made his experiment
using plaster; a small edition was later cast in bronze for Vollard.

Bust of Fernande1909

Woman with Pears (Fernande)1909

In this sculpture, three-dimensional volume appears to be made of
particles roughly equal in size. The ruling structural principle is an
equilibrium of volume and emptiness. The most important points - the
eye sockets, nose, lips - are done in accordance with their natural
appearance. But in the forehead, cheeks and neck the natural lie of
the features has been inverted - most noticeably in the neck and nape
- so that a new rhythmic sense arises that introduces dynamics to the
work.

Picasso used the same procedure in the three portraits of his
dealers, the Germans Kahnweiler and Uhde and the Frenchman Vollard
(above and right), painted in 1910. He did so in a way adapted to
painting, by dissecting the space and fragmenting the image. This is
the apogee of a line he had been following through a number of
pictures in 1909, most doggedly in "Still Life with Aniseed Brandy
Bottle". It says a lot for the non-representational autonomy
of form in this work that for many years its subject was
misinterpreted. In the middle is a bottle of aniseed brandy. The
translucent, reflective glass offered the artist a teasing visual
surface, especially because of the fluting. In every painting, this
analytic deconstruction of form inevitably led to the presence of
non-representational elements; and this led Picasso and Braque to
scrutinize the function of drawing and of signs.

Still Life with Aniseed Brandy Bottle1909

The line outlines the object and establishes a visual sign. In a
Cubist picture, though, this mimetic function is dissolved. Picasso
and Braque now extended the scope of signs in pictures, and alongside
representational images they included symbols and juxtaposed colourful
structures without content. It was a new approach to a problem long
familiar to painters, and the Cubists found new solutions. Titian and
Velazquez had drawn strength from the combination of mimetic
representation, in line and colour, and the sheer virtuosity of the
artist's craft - a combination which accounts for much of their appeal
to us today. In 1910, Picasso and Braque took the strategy to the
borders of pure abstraction. Paintings such as "The Guitar Player" or
"The Clarinet", compositions of great artistic charm,
clearly demonstrate that beauty in art need not be pinned down to
illusionist representation.

The Guitar Player1910

The Clarinet1911

Woman with a Guitar by a Piano1911

Cubism now entered a somewhat different phase, one that was
heralded in 1911 and led the following year to new visual forms
different in structure and principle. Braque, who had already used
single letters of the alphabet in Cubist paintings of 1909, now took
to using entire words. It was not a new idea; but in painting it had
been restricted to producing the illusion of real lettering actually
before the beholder. Picasso borrowed this, and in "StillLife on a
Piano ('CORT')" transposed it to a new level of meaning.
Whereas Braque retained the meanings of words and thus their value as
communications, Picasso was pointing up the random quality of meaning
in signs. The word "CORT" was a meaningless abbreviation for the name
Alfred Cortot (a pianist). But it was also a witty riposte to Braque,
who had included the words "Mozart" and "Kubelik" to suggest a
concert. Picasso's still life also used musical instruments upon a
piano, motifs which are directly related to concerts. It is an
enigmatic picture, walking a thin line between meaning and nonsense
and tantamount to a visual statement of epistemological tenets - and
yet insisting on the truth of art.

Still Life on a Piano ("CORT")1911-1912

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